Mar 022010
 

Throughout all the various additions and revisions to this website over the years, I’ve built up quite a pile of custom code – in the form of WordPress plugins, widgets, templates, and sometimes as standalone libraries. For ages I’ve thought of releasing some of these as free plugins, so others could take advantage of what I’d written…but somehow I never got around to generalizing or documenting any of it. My “blog time” just always went towards writing instead. The fact is that it takes far longer to produce user-friendly code than something customized to just one sandbox environment. For example, of all my WordPress plugins I never bothered writing even a single Options page – I always just configured them by tweaking whatever values I needed in the original source. Fine for me, but would never fly in a mainstream plugin.

Well, I’m finally going to try to start cleaning up and releasing a bit of this code – starting with the script I’ve received by far the most inquiries about: the Travellog. I’ve implemented it as a standalone Javascript library, very easy to use, which will automatically produce the cascading menus and all that good stuff given only the name of a Google Earth KML file. You can read its full documentation and download the source for free here.

Hopefully somebody will find it handy, but if not, at the very least I’m a hell of a lot better with javascript and JSON than I was a few days ago 🙂

  6 Responses to “jKMLMap Released”

  1. Good on you…..way to pay it forward. I have only lately started screwing around with custom wordpress plugins. It is definitely a nice way to compartmentalize custom functionality so that it isn’t affect via upgrading, and can easily be disabled / removed later. I am, however, still in the custom files without control panel phase :mrgreen:

  2. Definitely – over the course of this recent overhaul I learned sooo much more about how WordPress works, and have become really impressed at how well-designed it is. Once you learn how to interact with it properly, it really is amazingly versatile. Far moreso than “just a blog platform” 🙂

  3. wow, that would be a really sweet plugin… havnt really looked to see if there is anything lik eit, but when i was looking through your site and was looking where youve been, i was like, damn i want that too! nice work…

  4. Hehe…well feel free to use it! The JS is available on the page linked above and takes just 2 lines of code to install 🙂

  5. cool ill check it out.. i have no programming skills, but i do have an awesome idea that seems up your ally for a plugin, lmk if your interested!

  6. Nah I’m not a WordPress programmer, I just wrote these in the past for my own blog and figured I’d clean them up to share with others. I already have more jobs than I can handle (which is why my resume is more than 3 years out-of-date) 😛

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